A man who was cleared off death row last year following a scalding U.S. Supreme Court ruling over evidence withheld in a 1995 murder trial has sued the Orleans Parish district attorney's office, claiming at least $10 million in damages. The federal civil rights lawsuit by Juan Smith marks a renewed attempt to show a pattern of misconduct and lack of training in former District Attorney Harry Connick's office.

Smith, 38, filed the lawsuit on Wednesday, claiming Connick "directly instituted" a custom of ignoring exculpatory evidence. The result, Smith argues, was his wrongful conviction in a murder rampage that left five people dead in a house on North Roman Street.

That conviction would later help prosecutors land Smith on death row following his conviction in a separate triple murder that same year.

The latter killings, on Morrison Road, claimed the ex-wife of former Saints player Bennie Thompson; her boyfriend, Andre White; and her 3-year-old boy, Devyn Thompson.

The federal lawsuit comes nearly two years after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned a $14 million judgment for former death row inmate John Thompson. In that case, the high court found that that District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office could not be held liable for failing to train prosecutors to turn over evidence based on a single case, and that Thompson had failed to prove a pattern.

Defense attorneys complained that the ruling left little accountability for cheating prosecutors. Since then, advocates have been pressing to renew the fight to prove a pattern during Connick's 30-year tenure, which ended a decade ago.

The Smith case found Cannizzaro's office facing harsh criticism by several Supreme Court justices as the office sought to defend its failure decades earlier to turn over a key eyewitness's early statements to police in the Roman Street murder trial.

Juan Smith in 1995

The witness, Larry Boatner, first told a detective he was "too scared to look at anybody" amid the shooting spree. Three months later, he picked Smith out of a photo lineup and said, "I'll never forget Juan's face, never."

The high court overturned the conviction, ruling 8-1 that prosecutors violated Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 Supreme Court decision that said hiding evidence favorable to a defendant violates the constitutional right to due process.

Last June, Criminal District Judge Frank Marullo vacated Smith's death sentence in the Morrison Road murders after Smith's attorneys argued that 85 percent of the evidence presented to the jury during the penalty phase related to his earlier conviction.

Marullo declined, however, to toss out the conviction in the Morrison Road killings, in which Smith declined to take the witness stand.

A spokesman for Cannizzaro's office did not immediately return a call for comment. Along with Connick, Smith's attorneys have named former prosecutor Roger Jordan in the lawsuit, which accuses the office of "intentional, malicious and deliberate conduct" in Smith's prosecution.

Several other death sentences from the Connick era also have been scarred by Brady violations, advocates say.

But in an interview last year, Connick defended his record over three decades and scoffed at the idea that his prosecutors weren't properly trained in turning over evidence.